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Just once in a very blue ocean....
Jan. 24th, 2021 05:56 pmThere's a sportsball game tonight. Some around here may have heard about it:
It's the first time Buffalo has been this close to the Super Bowl since their four-appearance run way back when- and their opponent in the title game to get there last time would be these same Kansas City Chiefs. Someone noted a strange coincidence connected with that:
This is the third time the Bills have played the Chiefs for the right to go to the Super Bowl.
The last was 27 years ago, after the 1993 season.
The first was 27 years before that, after the 1966 season.
And that, in turn, got me to wondering:
Should I book a pair of seats for the 2047 title game or will I be underground (or perhaps under water) by then?
I should explain the "under water" part of that, because the year 2047 only means one thing to a small but weird number of people.
----
Television has always had a fascination with the undersea world- be it Jacques Cousteau's or Aquaman's or the Sub-Mariner's. All were features of my entertainment experiences as a kid; JC got his documentary series and his John Denver tribute, but I remember him for some bizarre reason for this brief parody, buried in the booster section of Mr. P's science magazine from my junior year:
Those other two were dueling DC-Marvel superhero types back in their bad early days of televised animation: Aquaman has finally shed his Lad and bad costuming over in that universe, while Namor is still stuck in Development Briny Deep due to MCU rights issues. Then you had the Seaview on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea from Master of Disaster Irwin Allen (later parodied in a weekend bad movie series called Voyage to the Bottom of the Barrel); the SHADO Skydiver from Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's late 60s series UFO, set in faraway 1980; and the undersea Ivan Tors trilogy of Sea Hunt, Flipper and Primus. But the first animated attempt at a far-futuristic underwater sea station was Sealab 2020:
Among other things, the crew of Sealab faced such challenges as attacks from sharks and giant squids, potential environmental disasters, and threats to Sealab and marine life from shipping.
But no viruses.
It was awful- but so-bad-it's good enough that it got remade into an Adult Swim parody called Sealab 2021 that lasted way longer than its subject. It followed the success of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which also spoofed a 60s cartoon from the same creator, and remains best known in our house for one, and only one, scene:
But we're getting off track. Course. Whatever.
----
The Spielberg blockbuster Jaws took oceanic adventure to a whole new budgetary level in the late 70s, and more attempts came and went in a sea of stupidity. A pre-Dallas Patrick Duffy donned the gills in a fairly horrid scifi piece from 1977 called Man from Atlantis, but in the early 90s, it was Spielberg again, this time joining forces with a respected television showrunner named Rockne S. O'Bannon, and a genuine oceanographer named Dr. Bob Ballard, to bring something to NBC in 1993 called seaQuest This, That Or The Other Thing. Lest the Jaws connection be missed by anyone, they gave the starring role to Roy Scheider and named another character after his sheriff role from that film. It got heavy promotion during the last of the Bills' Super Bowl appearances. The show, though, proved to be a revolving door of cast, premises and time slot inconsistency before being consigned to history by the end of its final series in 1996.
Until....
----
Somewhere in the years around the time of that show, I made my first Internet connections through a free local service called the Buffalo Freenet. It was text-only and nothing pretty to look at, but it had three essential hallmarks of 90s geekdom: email, message boards, and pretty unlimited freedom to talk about anything no matter how nerdy it was. Through that, I met some fellow Star Trek fans, and they, in turn, let me in on their effort to do an online webseries- text only- that would reboot the seaQuest franchise, already time-traveled once during its NBC life from the far-off year 2017 (ha) to a final season set in 2032.
This online version would boldly go another decade and a half into the future- to the year 2047. Other than that conceit, though, the promise was of serious stories with believable characters. No talking dolphin. No shooting the boat into space and encountering talking carrots. And with one and a half exceptions, the "cast" was entirely of the new writers' own creation. The half was turning a mid-level character from the show's first season into a recurring high-level mucky-muck at the "UEO" (which stood for "Not The Federation"), but their one concession to continuity and teenage heart-throbbery was essentially giving command of the Not The Enterprise to Captain Not Wesley Crusher. Jonathan Brandis was the actor, but of course this "series" had no visuals and thus nothing other than squee to connect him to it. (Brandis, all of 18 when he got the NBC gig, would die by his own hand in 2003.)
A semi-correction: we did have talking Carrots of a sort. In the original show's multiple incarnations from four years ago to eleven years from now, there was no real constant villainous force to contend with. No Not Klingons, in other words. The 2047 crew came up with one: the Carolinan Confederation, a split off from the southern Northern Hemisphere which didn't want to play nice with the established government and was not afraid to take the occasional pot shot at it. Given the events of the past few years and especially weeks, I'd say that one was called quite realistically. The term of derision for these insurrectionists among Our Heroes was "Carrots."
I wish I could tell you more about the backstory and characters, and except for one little thing, I could. I still have the 2047 Bible on my external hard drive. In Word. Password protected. I can't crack it.
But there IS evidence.
----
The "show" was hosted on a website with modest (for the late 90s) graphic content, but the "episodes" were nothing but scripts. The idea was for us to "air" them Sundays at 8 Eastern, the show's original NBC timeslot. I was originally brought on as one of the episode editors, and the process of submission, notes, rewrites, complaints, threats, whining, more rewrites and ultimate subjugation of the writer(s) often was still going at the designated airtime. But we hit our Sunday 8 p.m. target more often than we missed, and our series lasted the same three seasons as the real thing did....
but also had the same revolving door of cast, premises and time slot inconsistency before being consigned to history by the end of its final series in 2001.
I knew a couple of local people involved in this from the Freenet group. Others, some with actual writing credits and/or Naval experience, were brought in from around the country as well as from Canada. By the end, there'd been something of a coup by some season 2 n00bs, and I, along with the one friend remaining to this day from it, had long been shot out of torpedo tubes by the bitter end. This effort even had its own Wikipedia page for a brief time before being pulled for the usual reasons of not being notable enough, containing original research and such. A snippet does live on in the Wikinition of the term "webisode."
A website actually still exists with a home page looking much as it did on a different site way back then- but the episodes are gone, the "InfoBank" has been robbed, and that remaining friend and I were purged from the credits. (There is an email link to a no-longer-existent Freenet address to one of the series creators, who I do occasionally hear a kind word from.) But, thanks to Mr. Peabody, we still have a Wayback Machine. There, you can see older versions of these writings, including the three I can remember co-writing:
Crossover and Breaking Point from season 1, with the original series co-editor; and
Command Performance from season 3, with still-friend (until she sees I posted this;) Mel.
What I can't find is a satirical Christmas Special episode that I wrote with an even older friend, which may be as hated among the show's fanbase as the Star Wars Holiday Special is.
----
So root, root root for the home team tonight, but then take a peek 27 years from now. Maybe the Buffalo Gills will play the Missouri Indigenouses for the UEO Bridger Conference Championship, right on schedule. And hopefully by 8 on a Sunday night.
It's the first time Buffalo has been this close to the Super Bowl since their four-appearance run way back when- and their opponent in the title game to get there last time would be these same Kansas City Chiefs. Someone noted a strange coincidence connected with that:
This is the third time the Bills have played the Chiefs for the right to go to the Super Bowl.
The last was 27 years ago, after the 1993 season.
The first was 27 years before that, after the 1966 season.
And that, in turn, got me to wondering:
Should I book a pair of seats for the 2047 title game or will I be underground (or perhaps under water) by then?
I should explain the "under water" part of that, because the year 2047 only means one thing to a small but weird number of people.
----
Television has always had a fascination with the undersea world- be it Jacques Cousteau's or Aquaman's or the Sub-Mariner's. All were features of my entertainment experiences as a kid; JC got his documentary series and his John Denver tribute, but I remember him for some bizarre reason for this brief parody, buried in the booster section of Mr. P's science magazine from my junior year:
Those other two were dueling DC-Marvel superhero types back in their bad early days of televised animation: Aquaman has finally shed his Lad and bad costuming over in that universe, while Namor is still stuck in Development Briny Deep due to MCU rights issues. Then you had the Seaview on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea from Master of Disaster Irwin Allen (later parodied in a weekend bad movie series called Voyage to the Bottom of the Barrel); the SHADO Skydiver from Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's late 60s series UFO, set in faraway 1980; and the undersea Ivan Tors trilogy of Sea Hunt, Flipper and Primus. But the first animated attempt at a far-futuristic underwater sea station was Sealab 2020:
Among other things, the crew of Sealab faced such challenges as attacks from sharks and giant squids, potential environmental disasters, and threats to Sealab and marine life from shipping.
But no viruses.
It was awful- but so-bad-it's good enough that it got remade into an Adult Swim parody called Sealab 2021 that lasted way longer than its subject. It followed the success of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which also spoofed a 60s cartoon from the same creator, and remains best known in our house for one, and only one, scene:
But we're getting off track. Course. Whatever.
----
The Spielberg blockbuster Jaws took oceanic adventure to a whole new budgetary level in the late 70s, and more attempts came and went in a sea of stupidity. A pre-Dallas Patrick Duffy donned the gills in a fairly horrid scifi piece from 1977 called Man from Atlantis, but in the early 90s, it was Spielberg again, this time joining forces with a respected television showrunner named Rockne S. O'Bannon, and a genuine oceanographer named Dr. Bob Ballard, to bring something to NBC in 1993 called seaQuest This, That Or The Other Thing. Lest the Jaws connection be missed by anyone, they gave the starring role to Roy Scheider and named another character after his sheriff role from that film. It got heavy promotion during the last of the Bills' Super Bowl appearances. The show, though, proved to be a revolving door of cast, premises and time slot inconsistency before being consigned to history by the end of its final series in 1996.
Until....
----
Somewhere in the years around the time of that show, I made my first Internet connections through a free local service called the Buffalo Freenet. It was text-only and nothing pretty to look at, but it had three essential hallmarks of 90s geekdom: email, message boards, and pretty unlimited freedom to talk about anything no matter how nerdy it was. Through that, I met some fellow Star Trek fans, and they, in turn, let me in on their effort to do an online webseries- text only- that would reboot the seaQuest franchise, already time-traveled once during its NBC life from the far-off year 2017 (ha) to a final season set in 2032.
This online version would boldly go another decade and a half into the future- to the year 2047. Other than that conceit, though, the promise was of serious stories with believable characters. No talking dolphin. No shooting the boat into space and encountering talking carrots. And with one and a half exceptions, the "cast" was entirely of the new writers' own creation. The half was turning a mid-level character from the show's first season into a recurring high-level mucky-muck at the "UEO" (which stood for "Not The Federation"), but their one concession to continuity and teenage heart-throbbery was essentially giving command of the Not The Enterprise to Captain Not Wesley Crusher. Jonathan Brandis was the actor, but of course this "series" had no visuals and thus nothing other than squee to connect him to it. (Brandis, all of 18 when he got the NBC gig, would die by his own hand in 2003.)
A semi-correction: we did have talking Carrots of a sort. In the original show's multiple incarnations from four years ago to eleven years from now, there was no real constant villainous force to contend with. No Not Klingons, in other words. The 2047 crew came up with one: the Carolinan Confederation, a split off from the southern Northern Hemisphere which didn't want to play nice with the established government and was not afraid to take the occasional pot shot at it. Given the events of the past few years and especially weeks, I'd say that one was called quite realistically. The term of derision for these insurrectionists among Our Heroes was "Carrots."
I wish I could tell you more about the backstory and characters, and except for one little thing, I could. I still have the 2047 Bible on my external hard drive. In Word. Password protected. I can't crack it.
But there IS evidence.
----
The "show" was hosted on a website with modest (for the late 90s) graphic content, but the "episodes" were nothing but scripts. The idea was for us to "air" them Sundays at 8 Eastern, the show's original NBC timeslot. I was originally brought on as one of the episode editors, and the process of submission, notes, rewrites, complaints, threats, whining, more rewrites and ultimate subjugation of the writer(s) often was still going at the designated airtime. But we hit our Sunday 8 p.m. target more often than we missed, and our series lasted the same three seasons as the real thing did....
but also had the same revolving door of cast, premises and time slot inconsistency before being consigned to history by the end of its final series in 2001.
I knew a couple of local people involved in this from the Freenet group. Others, some with actual writing credits and/or Naval experience, were brought in from around the country as well as from Canada. By the end, there'd been something of a coup by some season 2 n00bs, and I, along with the one friend remaining to this day from it, had long been shot out of torpedo tubes by the bitter end. This effort even had its own Wikipedia page for a brief time before being pulled for the usual reasons of not being notable enough, containing original research and such. A snippet does live on in the Wikinition of the term "webisode."
A website actually still exists with a home page looking much as it did on a different site way back then- but the episodes are gone, the "InfoBank" has been robbed, and that remaining friend and I were purged from the credits. (There is an email link to a no-longer-existent Freenet address to one of the series creators, who I do occasionally hear a kind word from.) But, thanks to Mr. Peabody, we still have a Wayback Machine. There, you can see older versions of these writings, including the three I can remember co-writing:
Crossover and Breaking Point from season 1, with the original series co-editor; and
Command Performance from season 3, with still-friend (until she sees I posted this;) Mel.
What I can't find is a satirical Christmas Special episode that I wrote with an even older friend, which may be as hated among the show's fanbase as the Star Wars Holiday Special is.
----
So root, root root for the home team tonight, but then take a peek 27 years from now. Maybe the Buffalo Gills will play the Missouri Indigenouses for the UEO Bridger Conference Championship, right on schedule. And hopefully by 8 on a Sunday night.